Agenda

Monday 25/11-2019, Narvik

Map

1300-1315 Welcome, introduction, presentation of participants
1315-1400 Lessons learned from doing a Ph.D.

• Seraj Fayyad, Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Jordan: Doing PhD in IoT Security.

1400-1530 Presentations by the participants

• Ahmed Walid Amro: Connect and Protect: Requirements for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship in Urban Passenger Transportation
• Livinus Obiora Nweke: Resilience Analysis of Software-Defined Networks Using Queueing Networks
• Muhammad Ali Fauzi: Modelling Healthcare Staffs’ Mental State to Minimize Cybersecurity Risk
• Prosper Yeng: overview of modeling and analyzing healthcare staffs’ security practices
• Muhammad Mudassar Yamin: Serious Games as a Tool to Model Attack and Defense Scenarios for Cyber-Security Exercises

1530-1615 Life after the Ph.D.

• Oleksandr  Kazymyrov: Time-Lapse in Industry: 5 Years in 40 minutes
• Andrii Shalaginov, NTNU: Life after PhD: collaboration, networking and funding opportunities
• Berglind Fjola Smaradottir, UiA: The life after the PhD: how to find new projects and funding of proposals

1615-1645 Panel: Ask the Professor/Professional
1645-1700 Election of two COINS student representatives

To register,

1. Fill in an application for funding (type of support: “Ph.D. student seminar”)
2. Register for NISK (not mandatory, but highly recommended)

 

Logistics

The seminar will take place on Monday afternoon. NISK will start Tuesday morning (until Wednesday evening). For accommodation we suggest to follow the recommendations by NISK organizers.

COINS students get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Narvik) and accommodation (COINS+NISK). Students without a regular paper, i.e. none or a poster, get coverage for the NISK conference fee. This results from the longstanding COINS policy that presentations of full papers are considered to be in the responsibility of the student’s department.

NISK: You need to wear your COINS t-shirt and/or hoodie and upload a picture of you wearing it at the conference. You need to submit a 2 page travel report on your participation that can be shared with other COINS students and can be published on the COINS website after the event. If you present a poster at NISK, you send us a picture of you presenting the poster with a COINS logo instead of a travel report.

COINS supervisors get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Narvik) and accommodation related to their Ph.D. student seminar participation. COINS does not pay for supervisor attendance or participation at NISK, but you are welcome to book your flight so that you can attend NISK with your own funding.

SWITS students and Ph.D. students from COINS partners get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Narvik) and accommodation under the same conditions as COINS students.
COINS does pay for accommodation and NISK attendance for students that attend both the COINS seminar and NISK, present a poster, wear a COINS t-shirt throughout the NISK conference, acknowledge COINS funding on their poster and document their contribution by two photos of them taken at the conference and by writing a one page report on their seminar participation that can be published.

All inquiries can be sent to [email protected].

ECTS credits

Participating COINS Ph.D. can obtain ECTS credits that might be used towards the taught component of their Ph.D. programme.

Students need to enrol in “IMT6004 COINS Workshop” at NTNU to be formally allowed to get ECTS credits according to the requirements in the course description. (If you have taken IMT6004 before, you can enrol in “IMT6005 COINS Workshop II” (or “IMT6006 COINS Workshop III”).

Please indicate in your application for funding or by email to [email protected] if you are interested in enrolling in IMT6004. Students get a transcript from NTNU documenting their participation and then need to present it to their local COINS member institution. All consortium members agreed that participation in IMT600x would be recognised as being eligible for consideration towards the taught component of the Ph.D. programmes.

The topic of the summer school was network security.

Six invited lecturers, thirteen students from COINS and abroad, an international researcher, supervisors and an industry representative contributed to the programme. The topics of the lectures were:

• Sandra Scott-Hayward, Queen’s University Belfast: SDN and NFV Security
• Thomas Lukaseder, Ulm University: SDN-assisted Mitigation of DDoS Attacks
• Slobodan Petrović, NTNU: Approximate Search in Intrusion Detection
• Christina Pöpper, NYU Abu Dhabi: LTE/Mobile Network Security
• Steffen Wendzel, University of Applied Sciences Worms: Network Information Hiding and Covert Channels
• Christoffer Hallstensen, NTNU: Computer Network Defence – the big picture

Agenda

Tuesday 18/9-2018, Radisson Blu Polar Hotel Spitsbergen

Map

1300-1315 Welcome, introduction, presentation of participants
1315-1415 Lessons learned from doing a Ph.D.

• Chris Carr, NTNU: How to get (and not to get) a PhD + why you should / shouldn’t travel
• Andrii Shalaginov, NTNU: Ph.D: “Mission Impossible” or “Roadside Picnic”?
• Bo Sun, UiB: There is always light at the end of the tunnel

1415-1600 Presentations by the participants

• Adam Szekeres, NTNU: Towards predicting individual human decision making in the context of IoT security
• Ali Khodabakhsh, NTNU: Fake Face Detection: A Biometric Approach
• Jan William Johnsen, NTNU: Identifying Central Individuals in Organised Criminal Groups and Underground Marketplaces
• Mazaher Kianpour, NTNU: Cyber Risk Quantification for Business and Economic Gain
• Muhammad Mudassar Yamin, NTNU: Importance of autonomous teams in operation-based cyber security exercises
• Shukun Tokas, UiO: Language-based mechanisms for GDPR compliance

1610-1650 Life after the Ph.D.

• Berglind Smaradottir, UiA: Experiences from doing a Phd in ICT at the University of Agder – How to find a job afterwards?
• Bikash Agrawal, UiS: A journey from PhD to Startup

1650-1700 Election of two COINS student representatives

To register,

1. register for NISK, then
2. fill in an application for funding (type of support: “Ph.D. student seminar”).

Please note that owing to flight/hotel capacity, COINS only supports students that attend both the Ph.D. student seminar and NISK.

Logistics

The seminar will take place on Tuesday afternoon. NISK will start Wednesday morning (until Thursday evening). There are not many places to stay in Longyearbyen, so we suggest to follow the recommendations for accommodation by NISK organizers.

COINS students get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Longyearbyen) and accommodation (COINS+NISK). Students without a regular paper, i.e. none or a poster, get coverage for the NISK conference fee; authors of full papers get funding for the conference fee only if they in addition register for IMT6004. This results from the longstanding COINS policy that presentations of full papers are considered to be in the responsibility of the student’s department.

NISK: You need to wear your COINS t-shirt and/or hoodie and upload a picture of you wearing it at the conference. You need to submit a 2 page travel report on your participation that can be shared with other COINS students and can be published on the COINS website after the event. If you present a poster at NISK, you send us a picture of you presenting the poster with a COINS logo instead of a travel report. If you enrol in IMT6004, you send us an extended travel report detailing the presentations you attended, questions that were asked, and important points from discussions at the conference.

COINS supervisors get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Longyearbyen) and accommodation related to their Ph.D. student seminar participation. COINS does not pay for supervisor attendance or participation at NISK, but you are welcome to book your flight so that you can attend NISK with your own funding.

SWITS students and Ph.D. students from COINS partners get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Longyearbyen) and accommodation under the same conditions as COINS students.
COINS does pay for accommodation and NISK attendance for students that attend both the COINS seminar and NISK, present a poster, wear a COINS t-shirt throughout the NISK conference, acknowledge COINS funding on their poster and document their contribution by two photos of them taken at the conference and by writing a one page report on their seminar participation that can be published.

All inquiries can be sent to [email protected].

ECTS credits

Participating COINS Ph.D. can obtain ECTS credits that might be used towards the taught component of their Ph.D. programme.

Students need to enrol in “IMT6004 COINS Workshop” at NTNU to be formally allowed to get ECTS credits according to the requirements in the course description. (If you have taken IMT6004 before, you can enrol in “IMT6005 COINS Workshop II” (or “IMT6006 COINS Workshop III”).

Please indicate in your application for funding or by email to [email protected] if you are interested in enrolling in IMT6004. Students get a transcript from NTNU documenting their participation and then need to present it to their local COINS member institution. All consortium members agreed that participation in IMT600x would be recognised as being eligible for consideration towards the taught component of the Ph.D. programmes.

The topic of the summer school – secure implementation of cryptographic software – was chosen based on a poll among COINS students.

Six invited lecturers, sixteen students from COINS and SWITS, an international researcher, supervisors and an industry representative contributed to the programme. The topics of the lectures were:

• Lejla Batina, Radboud University: Attacks on embedded crypto implementations
• Justin Cappos, New York University: Securing software development for computationally weak devices
• Paris Kitsos, Digital IC dEsign and Systems Lab (DICES Lab), Computer and Informatics Engineering Dept (CIED), TEI of Western Greece, Patras, Greece: Detection of Hardware Trojans
• Mark Ryan, University of Birmingham: Protection of code execution using Intel SGX
• Peter Schwabe, Radboud University: Optimizing crypto software on embedded microcontrollers
• Alexandra Weber, Darmstadt University of Technology: Approaches to Reliable Side-Channel Security

An example of summer school report by Alexander Lindner (SWITS).

We had two and a half days packed with presentations, discussions, exchange of experiences, and networking opportunities for students doing research in information security in Norway and Sweden.

Thanks to all participants, you were an amazing group!

Registration forms: Registration for SWITS members – Registration for COINS members

Agenda

Wednesday 7 June 2017 (focus on COINS)

All sessions on Wednesday take place in room Dag Hammarskjöld

1130 Lunch & networking
1300-1430 Session COINS A: Invited presentation: Life after the Ph.D. [Kassaye Yitbarek Yigzaw, Yi-Ching Liao]
1430-1440 Break
1440-1530 Session COINS B
– “I attended an event with COINS funding. Here is what I learned.”
1530-1600 Fika
1600-1630 Session COINS C: Opportunities in the IT security sector after the Ph.D. [Davrondzhon Gafurov, Norwegian Directorate of eHealth; Lukas Rist, Symantec; Kyrre Wahl Kongsgård, FFI]
1630-1800 Session COINS D: Trial defence “Data Loss Detection and Prevention for Secure Cross-Domain Information Exchange”; candidate Kyrre Wahl Kongsgård, committee Slobodan Petrovic, Edgar Alonso Lopez Rojas
1800 Dinner
After dinner activity: Election of student representatives

Thursday 8 June 2017 (joint SWITS/COINS)

All sessions on Thursday take place in room Einar Gerhardsen unless stated otherwise

0900-1030 Session COINS E
– COINS 2017: Metochi summer school, ESORICS doctoral consortium; room: Einar Gerhardsen
– COINS 2018: Finse winter school, Metochi summer school, Ph.D. student seminar and NISK on Svalbard; room: Einar Gerhardsen
– COINS steering committee meeting; room: Tage Erlander 1

1030-1045 Break
1045-1130 Official Opening: Welcome, introduction, research group presentations (Chairs: Simone Fischer-Hübner, Hanno Langweg)
1130 Lunch
1230-1350 Session SWITS/COINS I – Forensics & IDS (Session chair: Slobodan Petrovic)

• Gunnar Alendal (NTNU), Security vulnerability research for use in digital forensics
• Asif Iqbal (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Digital Forensic Readiness in Critical Infrastructures: A case of substation automation in the power sector
• Chih-Yuan Lin (Linköping University), Timing-based Anomaly Detection in SCADA Networks
• Artem Voronkov (Karlstad University), Measuring the Usability of Firewall Rule Sets

1350-1400 Break
1400-1500 Session SWITS/COINS II – Distributed Systems Security (Session chair: Simin Nadjm-Tehrani)

• Xiaojie Zhu (University of Oslo), Framework for outsourcing location-based services
• Thomas Rosenstatter (Chalmers University of Technology), Vehicular Security: On Mapping Automotive Security Levels to System Requirements
• Romina Muka (NTNU), A critical review on Wireless Body Area Networks Security

1500-1530 Fika
1530-1630 Session SWITS/COINS III – Security & Identity Management (Session chair: Sonja Buchegger)

• Martin Brodin (University of Skövde), A framework for mobile device strategy
• Erik Bergström (University of Skövde) and Martin Lundgren(Luleå University of Technology), An emergent dynamic risk-based information classification process
• Stewart Kowalski (NTNU), Security Chains that bind us: A Mental Model Approach to Comparing Security Culture in Norway and Sweden

1630-1800 Parallel sessions SWITS/COINS IVa, IVb, IVc

• SWITS/COINS IVa – Panel: Ask the Professor (Session chairs: Andrii Shalaginov, Farzaneh Karegar); room: Einar Gerhardsen
• SWITS/COINS IVb – Focus group on mental models of redaction (Session chairs: Alaa Alaqra, Simone Fischer-Hübner); room: Tage Erlander 1
• SWITS/COINS IVc – Working group Cyber Security Challenge & Capture the Flag, preparation and courses (Session chairs Hanno Langweg, Felix Schuckert, Lothar Fritsch, Stewart Kowalski); room: Kungaterrassen
• Groups decide individually when to have breaks

1800 Dinner

After dinner: Visit of the Holmenkollen Ski museum (guided tour)

Friday 9 June 2017

All sessions on Friday take place in room Einar Gerhardsen

0900-0920 Summary of working groups results
0920-1040 Session SWITS/COINS V – Privacy (Session chair: Christian Rohner)

• Daniel Bosk (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), On sharing private calendars and scheduling meetings
• Alaa Alaqra (Karlstad University), Users’ perspectives of redacting medical documents
• Farzaneh Karegar (Karlstad University), Enabling Informed Decisions with Social Login
• Hamid Ebadi Tavallaei (Chalmers University of Technology), Local Differential Privacy Framework

1040-1050 Break
1050-1130 Session SWITS/COINS VI – Cryptography (Session Chair: Edgar Alonso Lopez Rojas)

• Lamya Abdullah (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen/Uniscon), Implementing Secure Multiparty Computation using Sealing
• Christopher Carr (NTNU), Scaling and fairness in modern cryptocurrencies

1130 Lunch

1230-1330 Session SWITS/COINS VII – Attacks and Protection (Session chair: Magnus Almgren)

• Ala Berzinji (Stockholm University), Cyber terrorism and Counter it on the Dark Web
• Linus Karlsson (Lund University), Bootstrapping trust
• Felix Schuckert (NTNU), Source Code Patterns of SQL Injection Vulnerabilities

1330-1340 Break
1340-1410 Session SWITS/COINS VIII – I moved from Norway to Sweden (or vice versa): Here is what I learned (Contributions by Lothar Fritsch, Stewart Kowalski, Edgar Lopez Rojas, and others)
1410-1430 Closing

• Summing up of seminar results, future of SWITS and COINS activities
• End of SWITS/COINS seminar 2017
• Coffee, departure, enjoy Oslo

To register, fill in the registration form:
Registration for SWITS members –
Registration for COINS members

Logistics

The seminar will take place at the Voksenåsen centre. Wednesday will be a COINS day, and Thursday+Friday will be a joint SWITS/COINS seminar. We have a number of rooms reserved at the centre. Once all rooms are booked, you need to find accommodation elsewhere in Oslo.

Useful links:

• http://www.voksenaasen.no
• http://www.visitoslo.com/en/transport/to-oslo/
• http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/59.97535/10.66545
• https://ruter.no

SWITS members pay a highly subsidised registration fee, thanks to MSB and COINS. kr. 400 per night for single accommodation, kr. 0 if you share a double room, kr. 0 if you organise accommodation by yourself. All payments need to be made by payment card at the Voksenåsen hotel reception desk. Please note that this also applies to those staying at Soria Moria, they also need to pay to Voksenåsen, not to Soria Moria.

COINS students and their supervisors get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Oslo) and accommodation.

All inquiries can be sent to [email protected].

ECTS credits

Participating COINS Ph.D. students can obtain ECTS credits that might be used towards the taught component of their Ph.D. programme.

Students need to enrol in “IMT6004 COINS Workshop” at NTNU to be formally allowed to get ECTS credits according to the requirements in the course description. (If you have taken IMT6004 before, you can enrol in “IMT6005 COINS Workshop II” or “IMT6006 COINS Workshop III”.

Please indicate in your registration for funding or by email to [email protected] if you are interested in enrolling in IMT6004. Students get a transcript from NTNU documenting their participation and then need to present it to their local COINS member institution. All consortium members agreed that participation in IMT600x would be recognised as being eligible for consideration towards the taught component of the Ph.D. programmes.

Agenda

Sunday 27/11-2016, UiB Høyteknologisenteret, Thormøhlensgate 55 – be there on time, because the building is locked on Sunday

How to get to UiB

0930-1000 Welcome, introduction, presentation of participants
1000-1045 Lessons learned from doing a Ph.D. [Simona Samardziska]
1045-1130 Opportunities across universities: Cryptography, Models, Network Security, Privacy, Secure Software
1130-1145 Identified opportunities

1145-1200 Coffee break

1200-1220 Elevator pitches (chair: Ijlal Loutfi)
1220-1230 Participants report from Mass Surveillance workshop in Trondheim
1230-1315 Working groups, e.g. a) COINS/SWITS seminar in Oslo June 2017, b) IMT6007 COINS IT Security Exercise in 2017, c) If you had the choice, what would you include in your Ph.D. training (and what keeps you from doing it?)
1315-1330 Presentation of working groups results

1330-1430 Lunch (delivered by Peppe’s)

1430-1515 Life after the Ph.D. – Penetration Testing in Financial Institutions [Oleksandr Kazymyrov]
1515-1600 Presentations by participants

• Dmytro Piatkivskyi: Problems of the Lightning network or is Bitcoin scalable yet?
• Sergii Banin: Applying low-level features for malware dissection and detection
• Manish Shrestha: Measurable security and privacy for services on the Smart Electricity Grid

1600-1630 Coffee break

1630-1730 Panel – ask the professor/professional

1930 Dinner (Egon Kjøttbasaren, Vetrlidsallmenningen 2
Map with restaurant location

Monday 28/11-2016, Høgskolen i Bergen, Campus Kronstad, Inndalsveien 28, room E123

How to get to HiB
How to find room E123
The lecture hall is equipped with a projector and a Windows PC with USB port for presentations in PDF or PowerPoint format. An HDMI A full-size port (or an adaptor to HDMI A) is required if you want to use your own PC for presentation.

0930-1045 Simulated Ph.D. defence [candidate Kassaye Yitbarek Yigzaw + committee, 40’+10’+10’+15′]
1045-1130 Presentations by participants

• Felix Schuckert: Insecurity Refactoring
• Ashish Rauniyar: Crowdsourcing-based Disaster Management using Fog Computing in Internet of Things Paradigm
• Kamer Vishi: TBD

1130-1145 Election of COINS student representatives
1145-1200 Closing

1200-1300 Lunch (lunch tickets will be provided at seminar)

(1600-1730 COINS Steering Committee meeting, E507)

To register, fill in an application for funding (type of support: “Ph.D. student seminar”).
Please note that you can stay on in Bergen for NISK, too.

Logistics

The seminar will take place at UiB on Sunday and HiB on Monday. NISK will start at HiB on Tuesday morning. It is up to you where you book your accommodation. NISK has some recommended places on the conference homepage.

COINS students get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Bergen) and accommodation (COINS, NISK). Students without a regular paper, i.e. none or a poster, get coverage for the NISK conference fee; authors of full papers should get funding for the conference fee from their department.
NISK: You need to wear your COINS t-shirt and/or hoodie and upload a picture of you wearing it at the conference. You need to submit a 2 page travel report on your participation that can be shared with other COINS students and can be published on the COINS website after the event. If you present a poster at NISK, you send us a picture of you presenting the poster with a COINS logo instead of a travel report.

COINS supervisors get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Bergen) and accommodation. COINS does not pay for supervisor attendance or participation at NISK, but you are welcome to book your flight so that you can attend NISK with your own funding.

SWITS students and Ph.D. students from COINS partners get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Bergen) and accommodation. COINS does not pay for attendance or participation at NISK, but you are welcome to book your flight so that you can attend NISK with alternative funding.
COINS does pay additionally for accommodation and NISK attendance for students that attend both the COINS seminar and NISK, present a poster, wear a COINS t-shirt throughout the NISK conference, acknowledge COINS funding on their poster and document their contribution by two photos of them taken at the conference and by writing a one page report on their seminar participation that can be published.

All inquiries can be sent to [email protected].

ECTS credits

Participating COINS Ph.D. can obtain ECTS credits that might be used towards the taught component of their Ph.D. programme.

Students need to enrol in “IMT6004 COINS Workshop” at NTNU to be formally allowed to get ECTS credits according to the requirements in the course description. (If you have taken IMT6004 before, you can enrol in “IMT6005 COINS Workshop II”.

Please indicate in your application for funding or by email to [email protected] if you are interested in enrolling in IMT6004. Students get a transcript from NTNU documenting their participation and then need to present it to their local COINS member institution. All consortium members agreed that participation in IMT600x would be recognised as being eligible for consideration towards the taught component of the Ph.D. programmes.

The topic of the summer school – authentication – was chosen by input from COINS students.

Five invited lecturers, sixteen students from COINS and SWITS, and two supervisors contributed to the programme. The topics of the lectures were:

• Mike Just, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK: Usable security and authentication
• Paris Kitsos, Digital IC dEsign and Systems Lab (DICES Lab), Computer and Informatics Engineering Dept (CIED), TEI of Western Greece, Patras, Greece: Hardware authenticity – Detection of Hardware Trojans and PUFs
• Herbert Leitold, A-SIT, Austria: Federated identity management, STORK, eIDAS
• Ravi Borgaonkar, University of Oxford: Authentication and related threats in 2G/3G/4G networks
• Yong Guan, Iowa State University, USA: Network Forensics – Challenges and Open Problems

Most of the participants had used the opportunity to pay a visit to ENISA in Athens on the way to the summer school on the island.

• An example of summer school report by Andrii Shalaginov.
• An example of summer school report by Herman Galteland.
• An example of summer school report by Martin Strand.
• An example of summer school report by Vasileios Gkioulos.

More than 70 people had registered, coming from all Swedish academic institutions that are active in Ph.D. training in the information security field. The spirit of the SWITS seminars encourages everyone to contribute with a presentation, leading to 35 talks within one and a half days. It gave a good impression of what is happening in IT security research in Sweden and of regional focus areas.

On the first day of the seminar, one of the three parallel workshop sessions was dedicated to cooperation between SWITS and COINS. We discussed research groups and the impact of the recently started IKTPLUSS projects on Ph.D. positions in Norway.

Of special interest to SWITS and COINS were:

• We again invite some SWITS students to join our COINS summer school. This year, the topic will be authentication.
• For 2017 we plan a joint SWITS/COINS Ph.D. seminar at Voksenåsen. It is a special place, dedicated from Norway to Sweden in gratitude for support during World War II. It will take place Thursday 8 June and Friday 9 June 2017. Save the date!

The seminar included a visit to the Military Aircraft Museum in Linköping where a dinner was held.

Agenda

Sunday 18/10-2015, KTH main campus Valhallavägen, building Osquars Backe 2, 5th floor, room 1537 – be there on time as the building is locked that day

0930-1000 Welcome, introduction, presentation of COINS+SWITS participants
1000-1130 Working groups, e.g. a) COINS/SWITS team for hack.lu CTF Tuesday/Wednesday, b) Student proposals for how to integrate 20 new students in COINS in 2016, c) Research collaboration based on topics, …
1130-1200 Presentation of working groups results

1200-1300 Lunch [Bullens catering]

1300-1345 From Ph.D. to industry [Ebenezer Paintsil]
1345-1430 E-health security [Mohamed Abomhara, Samson Gejibo, Leonardo Iwaya]

1430-1500 Coffee/cake [Bullens catering]

1500-1600 Panel discussion – ask the professor/professional
1600-1645 Computational forensics [Andrii Shalaginov, Ambika Chitrakar]

1645-1700 Break

1700-1830 Simulated Ph.D. defence [Samson Gejibo + committee]

2000 Dinner at King Tan, Sveavägen 47

Monday 19/10-2015, KTH main campus Valhallavägen, building Osquars Backe 2, 5th floor, room 1537

0930-1000 COINS+SWITS activities in 2016/2017
1000-1030 Election of COINS student representatives
1030-1045 Coffee break [Sandwiches, coffee]
1045-1115 Halfway to Ph.D.? What will happen next? [Oleksandr Kazymyrov]
1115-1130 Closing, ideas on how to give the new COINS students a good start in 2016
(In parallel: 1030-1200 COINS Academic Advisory Board meeting in room 4531 on same floor)

1130-1300 Lunch

1300 NordSec starts with keynote by Eugene H. Spafford from Purdue University on “Rethinking Cyber Security”

To register, fill in an application for funding (type of support: “Ph.D. student seminar”).
Please note that you can stay on in Stockholm for NordSec and CySeP, too.

Logistics

The seminar will take place at KTH on Sunday and Monday. NordSec will start at the same place on Monday after lunch. It is up to you where you book your accommodation. NordSec has some recommended places on the conference homepage.

COINS students get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Stockholm) and accommodation (COINS, NordSec, CySeP). Students without a regular paper, i.e. none or a poster, get coverage for the NordSec conference fee; authors of full papers should get funding for the conference fee from their department. CySeP participation is covered.
NordSec/CySeP: You need to wear your COINS t-shirt and/or hoodie and upload a picture of you wearing it at the conference. You need to submit a 2 page travel report on your participation that can be shared with other COINS students and can be published on the COINS website after the event. If you present a poster at either NordSec or CySeP, you send us a picture of you presenting the poster with a COINS logo instead of a travel report.

COINS supervisors get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Stockholm) and accommodation. COINS does not pay for supervisor attendance or participation at NordSec, but you are welcome to book your flight so that you can attend NordSec with your own funding.

SWITS and MyPhD students and Ph.D. students from COINS partners get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Stockholm) and accommodation. COINS does not pay for attendance or participation at NordSec, but you are welcome to book your flight so that you can attend NordSec with alternative funding.
COINS does pay additionally for accommodation and NordSec (or CySeP) attendance for students that attend both the COINS seminar and NordSec (or CySeP), present a poster, wear a COINS t-shirt throughout the NordSec conference, acknowledge COINS funding on their poster and document their contribution by two photos of them taken at the conference and by writing a one page report on their seminar participation that can be published.

All inquiries can be sent to [email protected].

ECTS credits

Participating COINS Ph.D. can obtain ECTS credits that might be used towards the taught component of their Ph.D. programme.

Students need to enrol in “IMT6004 COINS Workshop” at HiG to be formally allowed to get ECTS credits according to the requirements in the course description.

Please indicate in your application for funding or by email to [email protected] if you are interested in enrolling in IMT6004. Students get a transcript from HiG documenting their participation and then need to present it to their local COINS member institution. All consortium members agreed that participation in IMT6004 would be recognised as being eligible for consideration towards the taught component of the Ph.D. programmes.

Here are the reflection reports:

• Mohamed Ali Saleh Abomhara
• Andrii Shalaginov

The topic of the summer school – cloud security – was chosen by poll among COINS students. The programme committee consisted of Ijlal Loutfi, Patrick Bours, and Hanno Langweg.

Six invited lecturers, twelve students, and two supervisors contributed to the programme. The topics of the lectures were:

• Andrei Costin: Security of Network Monitoring Systems (NMS) for Cloud and HPC. Hands-on assessment, analysis and countermeasures.
• Kaniz Fatema: Privacy in cloud environment
• Daniel Hedin: Cloud Application Security
• Zhiqiang Lin: Everything You Need to Know about VMI
• Sandra Scott-Hayward: SDN Security
• Sachin Shetty: Moving Target Defense and End-to-End Defense against Kernel Rootkits in a Cloud Environment

Most of the participants had used the opportunity to pay a visit to ENISA in Athens on the way to the summer school on the island.

Date and topic for the COINS summer school in 2016 will be determined early next year.

A bold idea is to have a COINS student defend his or her thesis during the summer school next year.

• An example of summer school report and ENISA visit by Andrii Shalaginov.
• An example of summer school report and ENISA visit by Nabeel Albahbooh.
• An example of summer school report by Mohamed Ali Saleh Abomhara.

SWITS organised its annual seminar for the 15th time. It is held in a different place in Sweden each year, and this year it took place close to Västerås. 65 people from 18 institutions attended.

The first day started with an introduction of all IT security research groups in Sweden. Every group got some minutes to present its people, research focus etc. COINS was also given the possibility to present. Most of the remaining time was spent in sessions where PhD. students presented their research and status of their Ph.D. Presentations usually lasted 15 minutes each, including feedback and discussion. Presentations were grouped by topics, e.g. there were sessions on privacy, network security, information flow control etc.

In the afternoon of the first day, the audience split up into different working groups. One working group discussed cooperation between SWITS and COINS. We concluded with several ideas that we want to implement this year:

• Invite SWITS students to the COINS summer school on cloud security in Metochi in August. Daniel Hedin from SWITS is one of the lecturers.
• Invite SWITS students to the COINS Ph.D. student seminar in Stockholm 18-19 October 2015, sponsor travel+accommodation.
• For the week after the Ph.D. student seminar, and in parallel with NordSec, we envision to form a SWITS/COINS team with Ph.D. and master students to participate in the hack.lu CTF competition. An idea to have a team of professors in addition was dropped.
• A bold idea is to have a SWITS seminar in Norway instead of Sweden some time in the future, maybe as early as 2017.

After the formal programme, all participants were invited to the Sala Silver Mine with a long history.

The second day continued with student presentations and an invited talk by a representative of MSB (Swedish Civil Contingencis Agency), the sponsor providing financial support to the SWITS seminar.

Why it is necessary to have a women’s conference is to recruit women to the security industry – both in terms of education and to seek exciting jobs in an industry that will be of great importance in the future (digitization of our society). The conference is to ensure diversity and balance in this industry. To create an arena where women can gather – such as with Security Divas – should also motivate, engage and inspire more women to participate in this industry.

COINS supported Ambika Chitrakar and Yi-Ching Liao to participate in Security Divas.

Many of the competitors had experience from earlier competitions. At the COINS Ph.D. student seminar last week, the COINS team decided to take part without any special preparation. They finished among the top 50% of all teams. Owing to extensive research project obligations, most team members could only dedicate time in the beginning of the two-day competition. The COINS team reflected the distributed nature of COINS with students being based in four locations (Gjøvik, Grimstad, Oslo, and Trondheim) and communicating by text messaging and video conference.

Congratulations, Ambika, Andrii, Chris, Huihui, Ijlal, Vivek, and Yi-Ching!

Slides from the presentation.

(Note that order of presentations might change)

Monday, 13th of October 2014 (location: UiT, Nedre lysthus, Auditorium)

• 1200-1300 Lunch [served at cafeteria Teorifagsbygget]
• 1300-1315 Welcome to COINS Ph.D. Student Seminar 2014 [Ragnar Soleng]
• 1315-1400 Session 1: Speed dating [chair: Slobodan Petrovic]
• 1400-1510 Session 2: Long+short presentations by students [chair: Vladimir Oleshchuk]
  Yi-Ching Liao (HiG, IMT6004): Process tracking for forensic readiness
  Edgar Lopez-Rojas (BTH): Using financial synthetic data sets for fraud detection research
  Leonardo Iwaya (Karlstad University): Security aspects in mobile health technologies, Usable polices for Access Control Systems
  Martin Brodin (Skövde): Information security management for mobile devices in public and private organizations
  Gaute Wangen (HiG): Conflicting Incentives Risk Analysis
• 1510-1550 Break
• 1550-1710 Session 3: Long+short presentations by students [chair: Gaute Wangen]
  Andrii Shalaginov (HiG, IMT6004): Data-stream Mining for Rule-based Access Control
  Ijlal Loutfi (UiO): Identity Management as a Service
  Pablo Buiras (Chalmers): On dynamic flow-sensitive floating-label systems
  Zeeshan Afzal (KAU): Development & evaluation of a wireless IDS
  Huihui Yang (UiA): Formal Analysis about Security Requirements of a Group Authentication Protocol by Scyther
  Artem Voronkov (Karlstad University): Trustworthy system operations
• 1710-1720 Break
• 1720-1800 Session 4: Experience presentation
  Nils Ulltveit-Moe (UiA): My Experience doing a PhD

[chair: Andrii Shalaginov]

•  2000-2200 Social event

Egons Restaurant, Storgata 50

Tuesday, 14th of October 2014 (location: UiT, Fiskerihøgskolen, Lille Auditorium E102)

• 0915-1010 Session 5: Short presentations by students [chair: Hanno Langweg]
  Mathias Ekstedt (KTH): The cyber security modeling language and cyber security research at department for Industrial Information and Control Systems
  Chris Carr (NTNU): Homomorphic Encryption and our current research
  Germain Jolly (ENSICAEN): Software Evaluation of smart cards : Detection of abnormal behavior of a smart card application
  Bart van Delft (Chalmers): Very static enforcement of dynamic policies
• 1010-1020 Break
• 1020-1100 Session 6: Working groups – short-term stays
• 1100-1110 Break
• 1110-1200 Session 7: Long+short presentations by students [chair: Huihui Yang]
  Pankaj Pandey (HiG): Using Prediction Markets to Hedge Information Security Risks
  Tetiana Yarigyna (UiB): Client-side SSL certificate validation
  Dat Le Tien (UiO): Distributed and secure social network application using identity-based cryptography and free cloud storage service
  Ambika Chitrakar (HiG): Approximate search techniques for big data analysis
• 1200-1300 Lunch [served at cafeteria Teorifagsbygget]
• 1315-1430 Session 8: Simulated Ph.D. defense [chair: Chris Carr]
  Oleksandr Kazymyrov: “Methods and Tools for Analysis of Symmetric Cryptographic Primitives”; Opponents: Slobodan Petrovic and Vladimir Oleshchuk
• 1430-1440 Break
• 1440-1530 Session 9: Long+short presentations [chair: Tetiana Yarygina]
  Vivek Agrawal (HiG, IMT6004): Security and privacy issues in wireless sensor networks for healthcare
  Dijana Vukovic (NTNU): Improvement proposal for the CryptoCloak application
  Stian Fauskanger (UiB): DES S-box 4 is not like the others
  Simona Samardjiska (NTNU): Linearity Measures for MQ Cryptography
• 1530-1600 Election of student representatives
• 1600-1615 Break
• 1615-1730 Session 10: Panel discussion – ask the professor [chair: Simona Samardjiska]
• 2000-2200 Social event, awards, diplomas, prizes

Skarven Vertshus, Arctandria Sjømatrestaurant, Strandtorget 1

Wednesday, 15th of October 2014 (location: Quality Hotel Saga)

• 0915-1015 Session 11: Working groups – course portfolio, COINS/SWITS cooperation
• 1015-1030 Break
• 1030-1200 Session 12: Invited expert – Robert Frederking, Associate Dean for Graduate Education, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, shares his experience on how Ph.D. programmes work in CMU/SCS
• 1200-1215 Break
• 1215-1300 COINS Research School of Computer and Information Security – Closing, outlook
• 1300-1400 Lunch
• (1500-1700 COINS Academic Advisory Board meeting)
• 1600 Opening of the NordSec conference (same place)

The seminar is over and registration is closed. The information below is kept for archival purposes. Thanks to everybody who contributed to the seminar.

Logistics

The seminar will take place at UiT on Monday and Tuesday, and at Quality Hotel Saga on Wednesday. NordSec will start at the same place on Wednesday. It is up to you where you book your accommodation. If you want to stay for NordSec, you probably want to book accommodation at Saga.

COINS students get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Tromsø) and accommodation (COINS+NordSec). Students without a regular paper, i.e. none or a poster, get coverage for the NordSec conference fee; authors of full papers should get funding for the conference fee from their department.

COINS supervisors get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Tromsø) and accommodation. COINS does not pay for supervisor attendance or participation at NordSec, but you are welcome to book your flight so that you can attend NordSec with your own funding.

SWITS and MyPhD students get coverage for travel (least expensive practical alternative t/r Tromsø) and accommodation. Total support is limited to 5,000 NOK per student. COINS does not pay for attendance or participation at NordSec, but you are welcome to book your flight so that you can attend NordSec with alternative funding.
COINS does pay additionally for accommodation and NordSec attendance for students that attend both the COINS seminar and NordSec, present a poster, wear a COINS t-shirt throughout the NordSec conference, acknowledge COINS funding on their poster and document their contribution by two photos of them taken at the conference and by writing a one page report on their seminar participation.

All inquiries can be sent to [email protected].

ECTS credits

Participating COINS Ph.D. students might be eligible for getting ECTS credits that can be used towards the taught component of their Ph.D. programme.

HiG students need to enrol in “IMT6004 COINS Workshop” to be formally allowed to get ECTS credits according to the requirements in the course description.

Students from other COINS member institutions that do not yet offer a local course code could negotiate individual recognition based on an individual agreement. (And should ask their local COINS contact when local course codes become available.)

SWITS organised its annual seminar for the 14th time. It is held in a different place in Sweden each year, and this year it took place in Uppsala.

The first day started with an introduction of all IT security research groups in Sweden. Every group got three minutes to present its people, research focus etc. COINS was also given the possibility to present. Most of the remaining time was spent in nine sessions of two to four PhD. students presenting their research and status of their Ph.D. Presentations lasted 15 minutes each, including feedback and discussion. Presentations were grouped by topics, e.g. there was a session on information flow security, one on vehicular security etc.

In the afternoon of the first day, the audience split up into different working groups. One working group discussed cooperation between SWITS and COINS. We concluded with several ideas that we want to implement this year:

• Have a poster session at NordSec in Tromsø with many posters from COINS and SWITS students.
• Invite SWITS students to the COINS Ph.D. student seminar 13-15 October 2014, sponsor travel+accommodation, and organise student presentations as a mini-conference. With the mini-conference style, students could explore the work of a programme committee and the peer review process. The goal is to have a low threshold to presentation with (almost) 100% acceptance rate.
• For senior faculty/supervisors and also for Ph.D. students we intend to organise a workshop/session on Ph.D. supervision in information security. The goal is to exchange experience, and to share what works and what does not – both from the perspective of supervisors and supervised.
• For the week following the Ph.D. student seminar and NordSec, we envision to participate in the hack.lu CTF competition with a joint SWITS/COINS team.
• Potential lecturers from SWITS could already consider contributing to the COINS summer school planned for 2015.

After the formal programme, all participants were introduced to Uppsala’s history by Carl von Linne. The tour focused on the academic history of Uppsala, featuring the oldest university in Scandinavia.

The second day continued with student presentations and an invited talk by a representative of MSB (Swedish Civil Contingencis Agency), the sponsor providing financial support to the SWITS seminar.

Next year’s SWITS seminar will probably be organized in Västerås by Mälardalen University.

Security Divas is an information security conference with and for women that work with information security and ICT. The conference took place 16th and 17th of January at Strand Hotell in Gjøvik, and had remarkable female presenters in information security. One of them was Yi-Ching Liao, COINS student member, with a talk on security incident investigation.

Main topics of the conference were a description of the threat situation, handling of and examples of incidents and challenges related to reporting of events.

Berglind Smaradottir, COINS student member, said: “It was a nice event that gathered over 100 ladies working with information security. The topics at the conference covered aspects of information security in society. The conference gave many possibilities for networking and as a Ph.D. research fellow I established contact with other researchers that provided me with information on relevant research conferences in security. Thanks for the funding from COINS for the conference Security Divas.”

The first day was held at Rica Forum Hotel in Stavanger immediately after the closing of NISK. Focus for the first day was to discuss goals of COINS and how COINS can contribute to better Ph.D. training from the students’ perspective. A panel discussion with three Ph.D. supervisors present led to a lively debate about publications, the publication process, cumulative dissertations, authorship, and job prospects. Simona Samardjiska shared her experience with doing a Ph.D.

Wednesday 20/11-2013

• 1200-1300 Lunch
• 1300-1315 Welcome to FRISC/COINS Ph.D. student seminar [Aryan TaheriMonfared, UiS; Stig Frode Mjølsnes, FRISC]
• 1315-1345 Introduction to COINS and Ph.D. seminar [Hanno Langweg, COINS, Aryan TaheriMonfared, UiS]
• 1345-1400 Q&A on COINS
• 1400-1500 “Ask the professor” panel [Stig Frode Mjølsnes, Slobodan Petrovic, Hanno Langweg]
• 1500-1515 Break
• 1515-1600 “Lessons learned doing my Ph.D.” [Simona Samardjiska, NTNU]
• 1600-1630 Presentations by participants (i)
  • Gaute Wangen (HiG): “Working title: Conflicting Incentives Risk Analysis”
  • Simona Samardjiska (NTNU): “On a class of quadratic permutation polynomials over finite fields of characteristic 2”
• 1900 Social event at Hall Toll near the harbour

The second day was hosted by University of Stavanger. early-stage Ph.D. students presented what they intended to research for their Ph.D., those in the middle of their project reported results, shared experience, and raised issues for debate. Discussion of students’ expectations towards COINS was continued and several recommendations will be followed up in the steering committee.

Two representatives for the COINS students were elected as members of the steering committee: Pankaj Pandey and Ctirad Sousedik. Congratulations!

Thursday 21/11-2013 University of Stavanger

• 0900-1030 Presentations by participants (ii)
  • Pankaj Pandey (HiG): “A framework for comparison and analysis of information security investment models”
  • Mohamed Ali Abomhara (UiA): “Investigation of user scenarios with focus on providing secure and privacy-respecting IoT environments”
  • Kashif Habib (HiG/NR): “Adaptive Security for the internet of things”
  • Dijana Vukovic (NTNU): “Applied Cryptography”
  • Håkon Jacobsen (NTNU): “A new coding-based public key encryption and signature scheme”
  • Ctirad Sousedik (HiG): “Fingerprint presentation attack detection with OCT”
• 1030-1045 Break
• 1045-1200 Presentations by participants (iii)
  • Yi-Ching Liao (HiG): “Enhance process tracking for forensic readiness in operating systems”
  • Aryan TaheriMonfared (UiS): “SDN Software-defined networking”
  • Andrii Shalaginov (HiG): “Application of soft computing for information security: an adaptive approach to big data analysis in agile environment”
  • Samson Gejibo (UiB): “mHealth Security and Privacy”
  • Huihui Yang (UiA): “Privacy policies for online systems”
• 1200-1230 Students’ opinions and ideas for COINS
• 1230-1300 Election of two student representatives for the COINS Steering Committee
• 1300-1315 Closing, outlook on 2014 [Aryan TaheriMonfared, UiS, Hanno Langweg, COINS]
• 1315-1415 Lunch

The next COINS Ph.D. student seminar is planned to take place 13-15 October 2014 in Tromsø, prior to the NordSec conference 15-17 October 2014.

Attending students:
Mohamed Abomhara (UiA), Bikash Agrawal (UiS), Samson Gejibo (UiA), Håkon Jacobsen (NTNU), Yi-Ching Liao (HiG), Pankaj Pandey (HiG), Simona Samardjiska (NTNU), Andrii Shalaginov (HiG), Kashif Habib Sheikh (HiG), Ctirad Sousedik (HiG), Aryan TaheriMonfared (UiS), Dijana Vukovic (NTNU), Gaute Wangen (HiG), Huihui Yang (UiA) +2 master students.

Competition was fierce. Many of the teams had experience from similar competitions and focus on applied IT security in their daily business. Students in COINS mainly deal with fundamental information security, e.g. access control, authentication, biometrics, cryptography, and a bunch works on security management. Few actually work on research that fosters the skills needed in a CTF competition. Nevertheless, brave COINS students set up a team and set Norwegian Ph.D. research on the map. Students from the Swedish SWITS network had been invited and extended the COINS team virtually. Competition started Tuesday morning and was completed Thursday morning.

The COINS team finished with rank 176 based on the score for challenges solved. 708 teams participated worldwide, 413 of them scored more than 0 points. This means that COINS came out in the top 43% of all active teams. HiG, consortium member of COINS, had a separate team for bachelor/master students and that team turned out to be the best team in Norway, with COINS taking a 3rd position nationally. The overall showing was promising for a small team that had not worked together before, and we look forward to participation of a larger and stronger COINS team at a CTF competition next year.

Students considered the activity to be fun and a rich learning experience.

Thanks to all who supported the event.

The main activity of MyPhD is an annual 1.5-day workshop for Ph.D. students from the participating universities. Attendance of professors/supervisors is considered important, so scheduling is based on when the highest number of professors is able to join the event. Students decide for themselves whether they want to attend, but are often encouraged by their supervisors. Typically, about 5-10 professors and 20-30 students come together. Organisation is done by one or two Ph.D. students and administrative staff of the hosting institution for the year.

Every participant is expected/required to contribute. Students choose from one of the following formats:

• 10 minutes for short presentation of ideas/thesis topics (5 minutes/3 slides); MyPhD had 12 of these, and COINS student Yi-Ching Liao contributed one
• 30 minutes for research presentation; MyPhD had 11 of these
• 30 minutes for experience presentation, typically given by senior Ph.D. students sharing “lessons learned”; MyPhD had 1 of these

Students got constructive feedback after each of the presentations. Both students and supervisors engaged in discussion and helped to find exciting research questions and to scope topics.

In addition, there was a talk on how to learn from rejected papers to improve content and presentation for resubmission (with some diversions on the academic review process in general), given by Dieter Gollmann. We also were given the opportunity to give a presentation on COINS. That was well received and we discussed how students from both networks could benefit from interacting with each other. Invited speakers shared insights about research challenges in applied IT security as seen from industry.

A highlight of the agenda was a 1.5-hour panel discussion titled “Ask the professors/professionals”. Student could submit questions anonymously or by raising a hand, and all professors/industry panelists were asked to provide their opinions. Questions included e.g. “How much time do you spend advising your doctoral students and how much would you like to spend?”, “How many papers should one have accepted before submitting a dissertation?”, “How do you deal with choosing the authors of a paper?” Answers were by far not unanimously given, so both panelists and students enjoyed a lively discussion.

The audience was ca. 60% German students, 40% students with an international background pursuing a Ph.D. with one of the participatig German universities. All presentations were given in English, and all discussion was conducted in English. There was a clear “Laptops stay closed” policy, obeyed by almost all of the participants. Emails needed to be checked in one of the four breaks during the day. Keeping laptops closed kept everyone focusing on the talks and engaged more people in discussion than usually observed at conferences in the field.

On the practical side, auditorium and room for coffee break (including beverages and pastries) are provided by the hosting university, lunch is served in the cafeteria and paid for by the university. External speakers are not paid. Participants pay for travel and for the hotel they choose, as well as for the dinner in the evening of the first day. A social event on Sunday evening before the workshop on Monday/Tuesday was optional and led us to Korean finger food and karaoke.

Well done, MyPhD students, it was a great experience to see you all contribute to an intensive networking event!

Yi-Ching Liao, Ph.D. student of COINS in her first year, returned home with an improved understanding of the scientific business: “The research process is not about fire-and-forget, submitting papers one after another without improvement. Researchers should understand how and why to improve the state of the art, and receiving feedback effectively greatly increases the likelihood of achieving better research. Submitting papers is just a periodical phase, and always getting the ideas onto paper makes continuous research possible. Always measure the soundness and false negatives of the research outcomes, since information will be lost or missed by human beings.”

The competition is “challenge-based”, i.e. there will be ca. 20-30 challenges of various difficulty. The range includes vulnerable web applications, cryptography, reverse engineering and forensics, but also some challenges where you really have to think out of the box.

It is fun. It is demanding. And despite it being typically Norwegian to be good, teams from Norway most of the time do not play a role internationally. This should change. This can change. With you. You are among the smartest people in information security in Norway. Now it is time to show the world that you can take up a challenge when the rubber hits the road.

COINS will sponsor pizza and other healthy and not-so-healthy supplies needed in applied information security. COINS will connect you to a large virtual team – or fly you in to Gjøvik to participate in what is probably the largest Norwegian CTF team ever. COINS will invite students from our Swedish counterpart SWITS to join in a Nordic effort.

Participation in the COINS CTF team is an opportunity to take a break from theory, hone your skills and meet other young academics in the field.

Each year, SWITS organises a two-day seminar. The seminar is held at a different location every time, this year in Malmö (supported by Lund University), next year probably in Uppsala.

On the first day, research groups presented themselves with each group using only a couple of minutes. This was followed by three consecutive sessions of three Ph.D. student presentations per session, separated by a lunch break and a short break. The presentations were grouped by topics, i.e. “Smart Phone Security and Trusted Platforms”, “Privacy and PETs”, and “Software Security and Information Flow”. Ph.D. students were at different stages in their projects, with some having just started and trying to scope their topic, others in the midst of data gathering and evaluation, and others close to finishing, using the presentation as an exercise for their thesis defence.

After the Ph.D. student presentations we gave a presentation on COINS and discussed possible opportunities for Norwegian/Swedish cooperation in Ph.D. training in information security. The discussion yielded several good ideas, and as one concrete result we will invite students from Sweden to NISK, the annual Norwegian information security conference to be held in Stavanger later this year. More ideas were:

• Promote NordSec better on the COINS website, together with other similar Nordic events
• Joint courses, block-mode with SWITS member institutions
• Joint Capture the Flag events, joint teams, organise a Nordic event
• Joint SWITS/COINS event with students presentations/workshops
• Various competitions, e.g. along the lines of Harvard Business School competitions where there is a joint Norwegian/Swedish jury
• Share information about upcoming Ph.D. defences – and send out invitations

Parallel group discussions followed on “Software Security”, “Security Management”, “Network Security”, and “PETs”. After group discussions, participants went on a boat trip and joined for dinner.

The second day also had three sessions of three Ph.D. student presentations each, interrupted by an invited talk (Jonas Hallberg from FOI on the SECURIT research programme) and a lunch break as well as several short breaks. The seminar was concluded by an invited talk presenting new IT security projects at MSB, the department for security and preparedness in Sweden. MSB also supports SWITS financially.

The concept seemed to work well with participants and organisers, so we are considering to have the first COINS Ph.D. student seminar in a similar fashion.